Software clients operating on or in conjunction with a computer system are often used to access data stored at a server with which the computer system can establish communications, such as through a local area network (LAN). In many known systems, a server accesses a data system in response to a data access request received from a client.
However, the data system access time may cause errors for certain types of clients that time out if no response to a request is received within a predetermined response time. Delayed responses tend to be particularly problematic where communications between the client and server use communication channels or media having relatively high latency, such as wireless communication networks.
Various prior art approaches have been developed to address latency in data access requests. Once such approach is set forth in U.S. Pat. No. 5,802,292 to Mogul. This patent is directed to a method for predictive prefetching of objects over a computer network including client and server computer systems. The client requests a plurality of objects from the server, which are retrieved by the server and stored along with an identity of the client in a memory of the server. The server sends the plurality of objects from the memory to the client computer system over a network link.
The server also predicts a plurality of subsequent retrieval requests from the client computer system according to a predetermined criteria, and it sends the prediction to the client computer system. Prefetching of an object by the client may then be performed based on the prediction and other information. The patent states that with such an arrangement, an object may be prefetched before a user actually requests it, making the retrieval latency appear to be zero when a user requests a prefetched object.
Despite such prior art approaches, further techniques for reducing access latency are desirable in many applications, such as in wireless communications networks, for example.